Expect Things to Go Wrong

Now at Kobold Press. (This is the fifth installment in a series of articles for players hoping to get the best possible experience from their time around the RPG table.)

“Adventures, in retrospect, are pieces of extremely bad luck that missed a fatal ending.”
―Lawrence Griswold, Tombs, Travel and Trouble

It’s a shame that Lawrence Griswold isn’t better known these days. He was a real-life Indiana Jones, a Harvard-educated anthropologist and archaeologist who spent most of the 1920s and ‘30s carving trails through Guatemalan jungles in search of Mayan ruins and exploring the then-”lost world” island of Komodo, south of Borneo, where his expedition was the first to capture a live, adult Komodo dragon. A memoir of his adventures, Tombs, Travel and Trouble, was published in 1937, wherein he offered the humorously cynical view of adventure quoted above.

However much Griswold objects that “while (adventures) were happening to me, I cannot ever remember having been particularly pleased at the occasion,” or that he was generally “scared to death, too busy to think about it at all, or just damned annoyed” while his adventures were taking place, it’s obvious that in hindsight he loved every moment of it and wouldn’t trade his experiences for anything.

It would be foolish to expect adventures in roleplaying games to go any smoother than they do in real life. In fact, since our tabletop escapades never result in anyone really getting killed, injured, maimed, scarred, trapped in a labyrinthine tomb, or cast adrift in a rudderless boat for five days without water, they can afford to be even more thrill-filled than the real thing, the way a roller-coaster ride is more thrilling than a drive on the freeway.

Read the rest at Kobold Press ...

Dive Into the Unknown

Over at Kobold Press:

“… Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive―it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it?”

― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

In what I consider to be the very best types of roleplaying adventures and campaigns, both characters and players face situations where they don’t understand what’s happening and they’re being pushed to make decisions without crucial information. Sometimes they’re faced with a mystery, and filling in the missing information is the point of the adventure. Your opinion on that type of play might be different from mine; certainly there are players who like to feel as if they’re in control of the situation all the time. I don’t begrudge them their preference, but I do believe that they’re missing out on a huge quotient of enjoyment.

Most RPG settings are worlds of wonder. Whether you’re playing a fantasy game with magic and mythical beasts, a science fiction game with starships and aliens, a steampunk game with super-science and dinosaurs, or a post-modern game with vampires and murderous cults, the setting is rife with amazing things that don’t exist in real life. Experiencing the “wonders of the world” and uncovering its hidden truths can be a major thrust of the campaign, or it might be a sidelight. Either way, if players understand everything there is to know about the setting and the story they’re involved in, then I’d argue that the GM has made the world too small and too familiar.

Read the rest at Kobold Press ...

Steve

A Need for Speed

This week's Howling Tower blog specifically for players is posted over at Kobold Press. The topic is playing fast. I support it.

"Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in.”

―Napoléon Bonaparte

A combat turn in most RPGs represents 5 to 10 seconds. If you spend much more time than that deciding what to do on your turn, you’re wasting time.

That doesn’t mean your turn can’t take more than 10 seconds. It means you should answer the basic question, “what am I going to do this turn?,” in 10 seconds or less. Figuring out specifically how your character performs the chosen action within the allowances and restrictions of the rules can take substantially longer than that, especially if a fancy maneuver, an unusual weapon, or a complex magic spell is involved. But the basic question—”What am I going to do this turn?”—should be made quickly.

Read the rest at KoboldPress.com.

Steve

It's All About Teamwork

I've been so busy, I almost missed the latest posting of the second installment of my blogs for players over at KoboldPress.com. But you shouldn't!

A group of RPG characters is like a U. S. Army Green Beret team or a Navy SEAL team. Every member of the squad has a specialty, and for the group to succeed, everyone needs to be on the job. That means cooperating with teammates and sticking to the plan when the world, in the guise of the GM, throws its full weight against the heroes and tries to cast them down in defeat.

The story (the adventure) has a villain, and he wants to win. His goal is not to provide the heroes with a heady challenge that fills their lives with excitement before they inevitably triumph over the villain’s ambition. That outcome is the exact opposite of the villain’s goal (unless your GM adheres to the idea that villains should have fatal personality flaws like those outlined in this i09 article on the 12 biggest blunders evil wizards make. A worthy villain will do everything in his power to prevent that outcome.

This doesn’t mean the GM is out to screw the players, but it does mean the challenges characters face won’t be easy. No one should expect to be allowed to skate through “for the sake of fun.” Before it’s all done, you should expect to be in a no-holds-barred fight to the death—meaning that if you lose, you die. In a situation like that, what could possibly be your motivation for working at cross-purposes to the team?

Read the rest at KoboldPress.com.

Steve

Howling Tower Returns to Kobold Press

Hey, I'm back at Kobold Press. Today's post was the first of six aimed at players.

Welcome to the end of the Howling Tower hiatus—thanks for coming! The Tower has been silent for too long. During the past year, I’ve been so occupied with huge writing projects that no time or energy was left over for small ones. Lots of good things came out of the past year — Hoard of the Dragon Queen and The Rise of Tiamat for Kobold Press, and a trio of Fifth Edition books published by Necromancer Games: Fifth Edition Foes, Lost Spells, and Quests of Doom. But now that those massive projects are wrapped up, the light is flickering again atop the creepy tower at the dismal end of the valley, and eerie wailing can be heard wafting through the pre-dawn mist again.

This six-part series of columns will be aimed squarely at RPG players instead of GMs. Gamemasters have reams of material to peruse when they want advice on how to do their jobs better, but the pickings can be slim where players are concerned. The goal is to help readers develop better roleplaying habits and attitudes so they can get the most enjoyment from their time around the game table.

Just because the advice is aimed at the players’ side of the screen doesn’t mean GMs should look away. They’re sure to find some useful tidbits here, too. You can’t be a good GM without understanding where your players are coming from.

Most of what we’ll cover can be summed up succinctly in two words: embrace immersion. The more you suspend disbelief and think like a character instead of like a player, the richer your experience becomes. That little gem of an idea has many facets to explore.

Read the rest at KoboldPress.com.

Finally, A New Post

I'm horrified to see that I haven't howled from the tower since January 27. I believe that I have a decent excuse, though. I've been sequestered while writing the premier 5th Edition D&D adventures -- Hoard of the Dragon Queen and The Rise of Tiamat, collectively titled Tyranny of Dragons -- along with Wolfgang Baur and Alexander Winter. Until recently, we weren't allowed to talk about what we were doing. Even if we had been, every word I wrote for the last many months went into those adventures. Writing for other purposes, like blogging, could only endanger the deadlines, so everything else got shelved.

But now the adventures are written and I can move on to other things. I still don't have much time for personal writing -- more on that to come -- but at last I can talk about Tyranny of Dragons.

And I have, over at KoboldPress.com, in some of the Tiamat Tuesday postings. My entries are "Maintaining Focus," "Tiers of Tiamat," "Closing In On the Cult," and "So You're Running Tyranny of Dragons." Wolfgang, Marc Radle, and Guido Kuip also chime in with essays about the Cult of the Dragon and about the illustrations and maps in the adventures. If you're looking for direction on what to expect from Tyranny of Dragons, Tiamat Tuesday is the best place to start.

In other news, I'm headed to GenCon again this year, for the first time in . . . wow, it must be over 10 years. I attended a few of the early Indianapolis GenCons, but I stopped going after the year when I spent nearly the entire show sealed away in a side room playing Terrible Swift Sword with a group of fellow TSR alumni. We had a great time, but we realized that we didn't need to travel to Indianapolis, stay in dreary hotels, and struggle against constant crowds to play TSS for four days. We could have just as easily spent a long weekend at someone's house in Wisconsin or Washington, where we'd have been more comfortable and saved a bunch of money. I never went back after that year.

But here it is 2014, there's a fantastic new edition of D&D, and I have the honor of coauthoring the premier adventure for it. I'll be spending much of my time in the Kobold Press booth, discussing Tyranny of Dragons (and 5E) with anyone who's interested and signing copies for anyone who wants theirs besmudged with my scribble. If you're in the neighborhood, stop by and chat.

I'll also be sitting on a seminar panel: either "When the Kobolds Met Tiamat" at noon on Friday, or "Storytelling in the Realms" at 4 p.m. on Friday. I suspect it will be the first of those, or maybe it will be both, but I won't know for sure until I get to the convention. I'll also be interviewed on the official Gencon podcast at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday. Listen live if you want to hear all the scatology that will be bleeped out in the download version.

Finally, with Tyranny of Dragons put to bed, I'm now devoting my 12-hour days to Necromancer Games's 5E Kickstarter. But that's a topic for after Gencon. I hope to see plenty of you in Indianapolis.